Through the Times With Ronald Pies, M.D.

Psychiatric Times' columnist
Ronald Pies, M.D., is a physician committed to encephiatrics
("brain healing"), a poet with a compassionate heart and a philosopher with a
zeal for exploring fundamental issues of life.

A native of Batavia, N.Y.,
Pies was educated at CornellUniversity and then continued his studies at the
State University of New York Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, where he received his M.D. degree
and completed his residency in psychiatry.

"I had the sense from the very beginning that psychiatry was the specialty
within medicine that would allow me the greatest breadth and depth in terms of
my general interests," Pies told Psychiatric
Times.

Several of his professors at Upstate Medical Center (now University),
including Eugene Kaplan, M.D., Robert Daly, M.D., Richard Phillips, M.D., and
Ellen Cook Jacobsen, M.D., helped him see that that psychiatry "allows one to
create a synthesis of sorts, bringing in everything from biology to poetry to
art," said Pies, who is now clinical professor of psychiatry at the Tufts
University School of Medicine. Pies was also formerly
a lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School.

Indirectly, Pies said, the residency program stimulated his interest in
psychopharmacology.

"We had a very fine program and really excellent teachers, but it was
focused much more on psychodynamic psychiatry, including object relations
theory, and less so on psychopharmacology," he said.